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Scaling large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential for improving retrieval model performance; however, previous studies have mainly focused on dense retrieval trained with contrastive loss (CL), neglecting the scaling behavior…

In the competitive landscape of sponsored search, balancing retrieval quality with production latency is a critical challenge. While large retrieval models based on Small Language Models (SLMs) such as Qwen3-Embedding-4B/8B set strong upper…

In recent years, dense retrieval has been the focus of information retrieval (IR) research. While effective, dense retrieval produces uninterpretable dense vectors, and suffers from the drawback of large index size. Learned sparse retrieval…

We motivate a method for transparently identifying ineffectual computations in unmodified Deep Learning models and without affecting accuracy. Specifically, we show that if we decompose multiplications down to the bit level the amount of…

Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) is a family of neural methods that encode queries and documents into sparse lexical vectors that can be indexed and retrieved efficiently with an inverted index. We explore the application of LSR to the…

Retrieval over large codebases is a key component of modern LLM-based software engineering systems. Existing approaches predominantly rely on dense embedding models, while learned sparse retrieval (LSR) remains largely unexplored for code.…

The bi-encoder architecture provides a framework for understanding machine-learned retrieval models based on dense and sparse vector representations. Although these representations capture parametric realizations of the same underlying…

Dense retrieval calls for discriminative embeddings to represent the semantic relationship between query and document. It may benefit from the using of large language models (LLMs), given LLMs' strong capability on semantic understanding.…

Learned sparse retrieval, which can efficiently perform retrieval through mature inverted-index engines, has garnered growing attention in recent years. Particularly, the inference-free sparse retrievers are attractive as they eliminate…

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their size creates computational bottlenecks. We introduce a novel approach to create accurate, sparse foundational versions of performant LLMs that…

The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) presents significant deployment challenges due to their massive computational and memory demands. While model compression, such as network pruning, offers potential solutions, most existing…

This paper describes a compact and effective model for low-latency passage retrieval in conversational search based on learned dense representations. Prior to our work, the state-of-the-art approach uses a multi-stage pipeline comprising…

Learned sparse representations form an attractive class of contextual embeddings for text retrieval. That is so because they are effective models of relevance and are interpretable by design. Despite their apparent compatibility with…

We study retrieval design for code-focused generation tasks under realistic compute budgets. Using two complementary tasks from Long Code Arena -- code completion and bug localization -- we systematically compare retrieval configurations…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reward-driven training. Nevertheless, this process can introduce excessively long responses, inflating inference latency and computational…

LLMs have fundamentally transformed dense retrieval, upgrading backbones from discriminative encoders to generative architectures. However, a critical disconnect remains: while LLMs possess strong reasoning capabilities, current retrievers…

Dense embedding models are commonly deployed in commercial search engines, wherein all the document vectors are pre-computed, and near-neighbor search (NNS) is performed with the query vector to find relevant documents. However, the…

Sparse neural retrievers, such as DeepImpact, uniCOIL and SPLADE, have been introduced recently as an efficient and effective way to perform retrieval with inverted indexes. They aim to learn term importance and, in some cases, document…

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) is an effective IR approach that exploits pre-trained language models for encoding text into a learned bag of words. Several efforts in the literature have shown that sparsity is key to enabling a good…

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) has traditionally focused on small-scale encoder-only transformer architectures. With the advent of large-scale pre-trained language models, their capability to generate sparse representations for retrieval…